1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for visually depicting resource utilization in a cloud computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One area of rapid advancement is cloud computing. Cloud computing has become a widely used term to describe the use of computing resources, both hardware and software, that are delivered as a service over a network, typically the Internet. The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.
There are many resources available to a user through public cloud computing. In fact, there are thousands of resources that can be entrusted in a cloud computing environment and accessed as a service. Furthermore, different types of resource usage lend themselves to different cost structures and pricing. As the number of resources available in the cloud grows and the cost structure of using these resources becomes more complex, it has become difficult to provide a user friendly interface to illustrate to a user the user's current use of those cloud supported resources.